Adversity often creates champions, as Brady Fultz exemplified. During his heat race, he flipped. Fultz and his crew then repaired the damage to make it into the feature. From there, Fultz drove from a 13th starting spot to finish fourth at Woodhull Raceway.
“It was rough in the heat,” Fultz, of Dundee, New York, said. “I got ran off the track and gave a shot back. I was racing real hard when I went into the first and second turns. Then, I caught a rut. The crash happened so quickly — it was over and done with before I knew what was happening.”
The car landed on all fours and Fultz walked away from the wreckage under his own power. He sat in a Kirkey full-containment seat, with an Impact five-point harness. Fultz wore a Impact helmet paired with a HANS device.
As far as his 2019 Bicknell, the crash broke the right-rear shock and left-rear brake line, rotated the left-rear shock mount, and damaged several body panels.
“Never in my racing career had I flipped over — and never would I have thought a car that wrecked like this could do so well an hour later,” said Fultz. “We thrashed to fix this car — it must have been for an hour — to get ready for the ‘King of the Ring.’”
The King of the Ring is a tournament-style, one-on-one competition that preceded the actual feature.
“We almost beat Aiden Grover for the King title — but the power steering pump failed,” Fultz said.
Brady Fultz and his team have a never-say-die attitude, and they replaced the pump in time for the feature, where they finished fourth.
“The car could have been a little tighter and had a little more drive,” said Fultz, “but a fourth after the night we had is quite an accomplishment. We never gave up.”
Mike Adaskaveg has written hundreds of stories since the website’s inception. This year marks his 54th year of covering auto racing. Adaskaveg got his start working for track photographer Lloyd Burnham at Connecticut’s Stafford Motor Speedway in 1970. Since then, he’s been a columnist, writer, and photographer, in racing and in mainstream media, for several outlets, including the Journal Inquirer, Boston Herald, Stock Car Racing, and Speedway Illustrated. Among Adaskaveg’s many awards are the 1992 Eastern Motorsport Press Association (EMPA) Ace Lane Photographer of the Year and the 2019 National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) George Cunningham Writer of the Year.
